Kayak VR: Extreme on PS5 (PSVR2) - Am I doing something wrong?

[steven_walter]

After weeks of rationalizing whether I "needed" it, I caved in and bought a PSVR2 (I already have the PSVR for many years) over Christmas last year. One of the games I had my eyes on was "Kayak VR: Mirage" as I had read many, glowing reviews of it and I finally bought it and the DLC a couple of days ago as they had just come on sale so could no longer resist.

Am I doing something wrong? This game, on many platforms, has been out for a couple of years now, right? And I'm up-to-date on all patches presumably.

After being dumped in the swimming paddle and having a little splash around, I went straight to the extended training to learn the 10(?) moves.

Press X to commence it said.... well... no. Apparently on the PS5, that'll be the R2 button I think (discovered through trial and error.) And I reckon a few other controls don't match the instructions that appear on the screen.

But the big kicker was it threw me OUTSIDE of what-I-call the "swimming lane" barriers in which the ghost tutorial kayaker appears (I assumed it would place me straight on top or behind/alongside him so that I could see and follow his moves). And you can't go over the barrier AFAIK so you need to know how to maneuver anyway to go around and next to the demo dude for it to begin to register success. And the reset button (square I think), doesn't reset you to his position as I hoped might happen.

I restarted many times (and reconfigured the play area a few times as well on the off-chance that was throwing it off) but none of that seemed to have any positive effect. In fact, two times it gave my kayaker 20 foot-long arms that I'm not sure had a paddle in them and one time it had me floating upside down in the swimming pool, all necessitating another quit and restart.

Eventually I got through the training and decided to take it for a free-roam spin through the Antarctic. I was making forward progress, but it seemed so slow now I was in open water with room to move (in normal kayaking, a few strokes can get you up to a reasonable speed quickly). Some quick searching on the internet leads me to believe that there is an arcade vs simulation switch somewhere that will greatly improve this. But at this stage, this game was starting to make me hot/seasick (moreso than most other VR games) so I bailed on it and I'll retry it in another couple of days.

So, is my experience unique, particularly on the current version on the PS5? Have I missed something amazingly obvious that could explain the problem I'm having?

[grzegorz77]

Originally posted by steven_walter:

Kayak VR: Extreme on PS5 (PSVR2) - Am I doing something wrong?

After weeks of rationalizing whether I "needed" it, I caved in and bought a PSVR2 (I already have the PSVR for many years) over Christmas last year. One of the games I had my eyes on was "Kayak VR: Mirage" as I had read many, glowing reviews of it and I finally bought it and the DLC a couple of days ago as they had just come on sale so could no longer resist.

Am I doing something wrong? This game, on many platforms, has been out for a couple of years now, right? And I'm up-to-date on all patches presumably.

After being dumped in the swimming paddle and having a little splash around, I went straight to the extended training to learn the 10(?) moves.

Press X to commence it said.... well... no. Apparently on the PS5, that'll be the R2 button I think (discovered through trial and error.) And I reckon a few other controls don't match the instructions that appear on the screen.

But the big kicker was it threw me OUTSIDE of what-I-call the "swimming lane" barriers in which the ghost tutorial kayaker appears (I assumed it would place me straight on top or behind/alongside him so that I could see and follow his moves). And you can't go over the barrier AFAIK so you need to know how to maneuver anyway to go around and next to the demo dude for it to begin to register success. And the reset button (square I think), doesn't reset you to his position as I hoped might happen.

I restarted many times (and reconfigured the play area a few times as well on the off-chance that was throwing it off) but none of that seemed to have any positive effect. In fact, two times it gave my kayaker 20 foot-long arms that I'm not sure had a paddle in them and one time it had me floating upside down in the swimming pool, all necessitating another quit and restart.

Eventually I got through the training and decided to take it for a free-roam spin through the Antarctic. I was making forward progress, but it seemed so slow now I was in open water with room to move (in normal kayaking, a few strokes can get you up to a reasonable speed quickly). Some quick searching on the internet leads me to believe that there is an arcade vs simulation switch somewhere that will greatly improve this. But at this stage, this game was starting to make me hot/seasick (moreso than most other VR games) so I bailed on it and I'll retry it in another couple of days.

So, is my experience unique, particularly on the current version on the PS5? Have I missed something amazingly obvious that could explain the problem I'm having?

You should be interested in steam bindings, there you will probably find a schematic for psvr2 controllers, if not create your own. All this steam bindings is very unintuitive.

The errors you are talking about in vr result from poor calibration of the vr area. Or from a bad calibration of the height of the glasses.

When it comes to swimming, it's not arcade. The depth of dipping of the paddle and its angle are very important. (But maybe it's a problem with the height calibration of the VR headset ??)

Yes, there is a menu with the game settings. You can try different options.

If you have built vr legs (you write that you had ps vr for a few years) you should not have nausea. If you have no problems in other vr games in which you run or fly, here you should feel good.
Ps vr2 has a very high resolution, do you have a powerful enough graphics card?
You can also check out the game options, and previous topics here, on some hardware configurations you had to disable one of the settings, this has been described here several times. (Maybe it was fsr or something similar).
edit: There are also gameplay settings that help when you don't have VR legs.

The game should work very well. You shouldn't have any problems. And swimming should be fast (after getting practice).

edit:
Check the global settings of the vr headset in steam vr, people say that it should be set to 68% resolution,

[Stellar]

Originally posted by steven_walter:

After weeks of rationalizing whether I "needed" it, I caved in and bought a PSVR2 (I already have the PSVR for many years) over Christmas last year. One of the games I had my eyes on was "Kayak VR: Mirage" as I had read many, glowing reviews of it and I finally bought it and the DLC a couple of days ago as they had just come on sale so could no longer resist.

Am I doing something wrong? This game, on many platforms, has been out for a couple of years now, right? And I'm up-to-date on all patches presumably.

After being dumped in the swimming paddle and having a little splash around, I went straight to the extended training to learn the 10(?) moves.

Press X to commence it said.... well... no. Apparently on the PS5, that'll be the R2 button I think (discovered through trial and error.) And I reckon a few other controls don't match the instructions that appear on the screen.

But the big kicker was it threw me OUTSIDE of what-I-call the "swimming lane" barriers in which the ghost tutorial kayaker appears (I assumed it would place me straight on top or behind/alongside him so that I could see and follow his moves). And you can't go over the barrier AFAIK so you need to know how to maneuver anyway to go around and next to the demo dude for it to begin to register success. And the reset button (square I think), doesn't reset you to his position as I hoped might happen.

I restarted many times (and reconfigured the play area a few times as well on the off-chance that was throwing it off) but none of that seemed to have any positive effect. In fact, two times it gave my kayaker 20 foot-long arms that I'm not sure had a paddle in them and one time it had me floating upside down in the swimming pool, all necessitating another quit and restart.

Eventually I got through the training and decided to take it for a free-roam spin through the Antarctic. I was making forward progress, but it seemed so slow now I was in open water with room to move (in normal kayaking, a few strokes can get you up to a reasonable speed quickly). Some quick searching on the internet leads me to believe that there is an arcade vs simulation switch somewhere that will greatly improve this. But at this stage, this game was starting to make me hot/seasick (moreso than most other VR games) so I bailed on it and I'll retry it in another couple of days.

So, is my experience unique, particularly on the current version on the PS5? Have I missed something amazingly obvious that could explain the problem I'm having?

grzegorz77 already touched on a few points but I'd love to hear if any of the accessibility settings that can help combat motion sickness help for you. The fact that resetting isn't working for you the way it should is a bit puzzling, have you tried opening the menu and calibrating / resetting position through there? (They're separate settings). You can alternatively hold square to reset position. And finally its definitely possible to build up good speed by kayaking in the game, unrealistically so in fact. We don't have a simulation mode anymore so its just the arcade mode now. Making deep strokes in the water and having a clean exit of the paddle from the water are two of the biggest points to look out for, because you don't feel water resistance it might not be as intuitive as it is in real life.